The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

Alex Garfield, the CEO of Evil Geniuses (Team EG), is one of the most powerful and successful businessmen in eSports today. The 27-year-old studied Ancient Greek at Pomona College, and he’s now forging the expansion of pro gaming into major brands like Monster Energy Drink and Intel. And he’s doing it without the help of venture capitalists and without amassing exorbitant debt along the way.

Garfield, who rarely gives interviews, opens up about the early days of Evil Geniuses and how what has become the most successful team in eSports today almost closed shop in 2001. This is the first part in a series of exclusive interviews with Garfield.

How did Evil Geniuses begin?

I started this out of my college dorm room in 2005. I inherited the name, Evil Geniuses. It was the name of a Quake clan and a Counter-Strike team based up in Western Canada that had been in existence since about 1999. They had a couple of hardware sponsorships and things were just not working out. There was a dispute between the manager and the players on the team and long story short, the team was going to disband. I was writing for them as an editor-in-chief at the time and I loved this particular group of guys that played for the team. I told them that they shouldn’t quit and I would find us sponsors and they kind of raised an eyebrow and chuckled at me. I just started cold calling people from my dorm room. My first sales deck was a half of page of a Microsoft Word document. I landed a couple of deals, one with a keyboard company that doesn’t even exist anymore, and Steel Series was one of my first sponsors way back then. It cost about $500 bucks to get the team to a CPL (Cyberathlete Professional League) event, where they ended up finishing second. And it just kind of started snowballing from there.

How did Evil Geniuses grow into the entity it is today?

My goal was always to get sponsors to help my friends continue to do what they do, and I just got better and better at that and amassed more and more sponsors. Back in the Counter-Strike days, 3D and Complexity were the big dogs of North America for a very long time and then both of those brands were acquired by News Corp for the Championship Gaming Series (CGS). My Counter-Strike team was drafted into the CGS, and at that time the only player I had left was a Canadian Quake player. I was sitting on all of these sponsorships, which I believe at the time amounted to the second most sponsorships in eSports. I was convincing American companies to invest in my Canadian team even when they didn’t ship product to Canada. My sales pitch was pretty good, but I was actually going to close the company because my friends were gone. But my Mom stepped in and said these companies still want to do business with you and I didn’t really realize that until that point. I was 21 in 2007 and obviously I decided to keep the business going. From there, it’s been about developing a skill set, figuring out how to show value to companies, getting better at cold calling, bringing in more people and as the deals got bigger and bigger, acquiring the necessary talent to sell into them. In 2007, that’s when I started bringing in American players and teams from all over North America.

How have you seen sponsors grow into more mainstream brands like Monster, Red Bull, Dr. Pepper and Gamma Labs?

I think that very few entities in this space are able to speak the necessary language and show value in the right way to large brands. MLG has obviously been doing it for a while, but I don’t really think many other entities, if any, aside from MLG and EG, know how to do it. Red Bull, for example, is very much aware of this space and they’re doing some cool events obviously with – hosting and stuff. We obviously have a lot going on with Monster.

But I think if you look at them, there are a lot of StarCraft II players and teams out there. There are a lot of eSports organizations out there. To my knowledge there’s been no major Red Bull deal with a large eSports organization. These big brands are not going to come in and just slap a logo on a player. It doesn’t work that way. You need to come to a large brand with a robust enough package of ways to show them value for them to even think that it’s worth their time. A lot of people in the States think that sponsorships are about slapping a brand on a website and shirt, and it does not work that way. It doesn’t work that way in NASCAR and it doesn’t work that way in eSports and people who think it does just don’t get it.

What’s the secret to the success Evil Geniuses has had?

I think EG certainly has a lot of good players, in particularly in StarCraft II, but there are obviously a lot of other good players out there. I don’t think people approach the brands with the right package of services, and honestly the reach might not be big enough to maintain the attention of those large brands. We’re in our second term with our Monster deal and they are very, very happy with what we’re doing. If we hadn’t been big enough and spoken the right language and had a diverse enough portfolio of services to offer them I don’t think we would have gotten that deal when we did, but it’s working for us. Even our Intel deal is very challenging to maintain. It’s good because people have been seeing that logo on our players for a very long time, but just because Intel is a computer company doesn’t mean it’s an easy deal. I’m very grateful for the Intel group that has been supporting us for the past several years like the Motherboards group, but Intel is a very complicated company marketing-wise. Several years ago we were only able to get the attention of certain marketing groups, but now because we have a large reach and a more diverse portfolio of marketing services, we can really be an all-in-one agency solution. All these different groups at Intel are coming to us that didn’t want to talk to us before.